Derate The Hate

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Most of us talk about injustice all the time. Far fewer of us stop to ask what justice actually is. John Adams has spent years with that question, first reading the great books in hotel rooms between deals, then translating them into games and puzzles as a youth pastor, and now in his novel, The Third Phase. The book gre...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) William F. Buckley Jr. had strong opinions and never apologized for them. He also spent forty years as close friends with liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and decades more as a friend of Ira Glasser, longtime head of the ACLU. When a fellow conservative publicly complained that Buckley had too many liberal frien...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Trime Persinger’s homework assignment was simple: take ten “you” statements and turn them into “I” statements. She couldn’t do the first one. “You make me angry” was the language she grew up with, and she didn’t have another way to say it. Her instructor stayed after class and wrote all ten for her. That moment set Trime...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Matt Koesters didn’t come to electoral reform through theory. He came to it by watching it happen. As a reporter in southern Indiana, he covered a sheriff’s race where the winner needed just 37.7 percent of the vote, because the majority split its support between two candidates. The result reshaped local politics almost...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Dialog Lab is a new app built on a simple premise: most people want to talk to someone who disagrees with them, they just don't know where to find that person, or they're afraid of what it might cost them. The app matches users with someone who sees a topic differently, lets the conversation happen asynchronous...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Lura Forcum returns to talk about a word that's everywhere in politics right now: purity test. Her recent USA Today op-ed argues that the Democratic Socialists of America have pulled the Democratic Party further left , and Wilk and Lura use that as a jumping-off point to dig into something people on both sides of th...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Adam Mizel is back on the show with an update on Unity Seats, the program he built to get strangers from different walks of life sitting together at games — and it's grown fast. Since his last visit, Adam and his team at US United have run Unity Seats with the Twins, the Lynx, and the Vikings here in Minnesota, work...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Larry Rosen built a career as a mediator, working through disputes between people who already knew each other and had a reason to want to get along — business partners, divorcing couples, families untangling an inheritance. He started wondering whether that same process could work between total strangers who disagreed ab...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Wesley Warshawer grew up in Tucson in a house full of difference — different religions, politics, and backgrounds — and never thought much of it. That changed in 2017, when a poll about the American electorate made him realize how disconnected he'd become from half his own country, despite years spent studying and l...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) The Minnesota Land of Neighbors campaign is a multi-year, collaborative effort by a coalition of Minnesota foundations and bridging organizations — including Braver Angels, Civic Bridgers, Common Ground USA, CRD Connect, and Media Minefield—highlighting our shared values while countering toxic division and helping Minnes...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Roshan Bliss has spent his career working the space between people who disagree — first as a mediator, then as a public deliberation practitioner, and now as the architect of one of the more ambitious bridging projects out there: a reality TV show called A House Divided. Roshan and Wilk dig into the idea of “many-to-many...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Kelsey Blahnik has spent her career as a social worker sitting across from people who don't see eye to eye—politically, personally, every which way—and she's found that peace was never about avoiding the hard conversation. It's about learning how to have it. In this episode, Kelsey and Wilk dig into her bo...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Erez Levin spent nearly a decade inside Google's ad tech world before becoming one of the loudest internal voices warning that the industry was built to reward quantity over quality — and that those same broken incentives are what fuel outrage, fear, and grievance across the wider internet. Now Erez writes at Holdin...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Paid protesting is one of the most divisive — and misunderstood — topics in American civic life. Adam Swart, founder of Crowds on Demand, has spent over a decade inside that world, organizing demonstrations across the political spectrum. In this conversation, he pulls back the curtain on how modern protests actually get...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Elizaveta Friesem has spent her career trying to understand why people who could be connected end up disconnected instead — and why so much of that disconnection gets explained away with blame. Her book, Media Is Us, starts from a simple but disruptive idea: media isn't some outside force manipulating us. It's...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Shaka Mitchell is a lawyer and education policy veteran who built something unusual out of a pandemic-era habit: getting friends together once a month, picking songs tied to a theme, and talking about why. That casual ritual became the Come Together Music Project, now a podcast and live event series Shaka's run with...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Maryam Mehrtash spent nearly two decades building narratives for Marvel, Disney, Paramount, and some of the biggest brands in entertainment. Before that, she was a refugee kid learning English from cartoons, carrying forward the storytelling legacy of a grandmother who was imprisoned in Iran for the same gift. In this co...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Julia Minson has spent 25 years studying disagreement—not how to win arguments, but how people actually engage with views that conflict with their own. She’s a Harvard professor, a behavioral scientist, and the author of How to Disagree Better . This conversation gets into the heart of her research. One of the most usefu...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Diego Sanchez grew up undocumented in the United States. Jim Robb spent nearly thirty years fighting for immigration restrictions. They sat down at the same table, and discovered something neither of them fully expected: they could trust each other. This bonus episode drops ahead of the 2026 Braver Angels National Conven...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) What if the problem isn't the people on the other side — what if the problem is just hard? Martin Carcasson has spent 20 years building deliberative processes in Northern Colorado that help communities move from argument to action. The Center for Public Deliberation he founded at CSU has run over 600 community meeti...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Jan Jekielek spent years as a human rights worker before becoming a journalist — and the story he couldn't stop following eventually became Killed to Order, a New York Times bestselling investigation into China's forced organ harvesting industry. In this conversation, Jan and Wilk focus on a question at the cen...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Kevin Dolan and Peter Calfee met at a Veterans Day luncheon in 2022 and spent three years writing Hijacked: Our Republic — a book built around one essential question: what does it take to keep what the founders built? In this conversation, Kevin and Peter walk through the six foundational pillars they believe hold a repu...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Brian Vogt spent 20-plus years strengthening democracy around the world. Then he came home—and started listening. His Democracy Listening Tour of Red America is a qualitative research project with a simple but radical premise: before you can reform anything, you have to understand what people actually believe and why. In...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) Michael Lee is a professor of communication and the director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. He came to civility work through competitive debate—and found that debate, at its best, is deeply connective and dialogic. In this conversation, Michael and Wilk explore what’s really going on when people...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply) What happens when a gun violence prevention researcher walks into a gun shop, sits down with the owner, and actually listens? For Dr. Michael Siegel, it changed everything. In this episode, Wilk sits down with Dr. Mike Siegel to talk about his Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy project — a three-year effort that broug...